As a young man, he spent six years in exile, working closely with fellow exiles Lenin and Trotsky.
After the revolution of February 1917, he returned to Moscow, where his
Bolshevik credentials earned him a high rank in the party, and after
the October Revolution, he became editor of the party newspaper Pravda.

Within the bitterly divided Bolsheviks, his gradual move to the right, as a defender of the New Economic Policy (NEP), positioned him favourably as Stalin's chief ally, and together they ousted Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the party leadership. From 1926 to 1929, Bukharin enjoyed great power as General Secretary of Comintern's executive committee. But Stalin’s decision to proceed with collectivisation drove the two men apart, and Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo.

When the Great Purge
began in 1936, Stalin looked for any pretext to liquidate his former
allies and rivals for power, and some of Bukharin's letters,
conversations and tapped phone calls indicated disloyalty. Arrested in
February 1937, he was charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet
state and executed in March 1938, after a trial that alienated many
Western communist sympathisers.

Contents

Contents

1 Before 1917

2 1917 to 1923

3 Power struggle

4 Fall from power

5 Great purge

6 Tightening noose

7 Trial

8 Execution

9 Political stature and achievements

10 Works

10.1 Books and articles

10.2 Cartoons

Nikolai Bukharin was born on September 27 (October 9, new style), 1888 in Moscow.[1] He was the second son of two schoolteachers, Ivan Gavrilovich Bukharin and Liubov Ivanovna Bukharina.[1] His childhood is vividly recounted in his mostly autobiographic novel How It All Began.

Bukharin's political life began at the age of sixteen with his lifelong friend Ilya Ehrenburg when he participated in student activities at Moscow University related to the Russian Revolution of 1905. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906, becoming a member of the Bolshevik faction. With Grigori Sokolnikov, he convened the 1907 national youth conference in Moscow, which was later considered the founding of Komsomol.

By age twenty, he was a member of the Moscow Committee of the party. The committee was heavily infiltrated by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana.
As one of its leaders, Bukharin quickly became a person of interest to
them. During this time, he became closely associated with Valerian Obolensky and Vladimir Smirnov,
and also met his future first wife, Nadezhda Mikhailovna Lukina, his
cousin and the sister of Nikolai Lukin, who was also a member of the
party. They married soon after their exile, in 1911.

In 1911, after a brief imprisonment, Bukharin was exiled to Onega in Arkhangelsk, but soon escaped to Hanover, where he stayed for a year before visiting Kraków in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin
for the first time. During the exile, he continued his education and
wrote several books that established him as a major Bolshevik theorist
in his 20's. His work, Imperialism and World Economy influenced Lenin, who freely borrowed from it[2][citation needed] in his larger and better known work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Nevertheless, he and Lenin often had hot disputes on theoretical issues
and Bukharin's closeness with the European Left and his anti-statist tendencies. Bukharin developed an interest in the works of Austrian Marxists and non-Marxist economic theorists, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, who deviated from Leninist positions. Also while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin write an article, Marxism and the National Question, at Lenin's request.

In October 1916, while based in New York City, he edited the newspaper Novy Mir (New World) with Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai.
When Trotsky arrived in New York in January 1917, Bukharin was the
first to greet him (as Trotsky's wife recalled, "with a bear hug and
immediately began to tell them about a public library which stayed open
late at night and which he proposed to show us at once" dragging the
tired Trotskys across town "to admire his great discovery").[3]

1917 to 1923

A representative front page of Pravda, 1917

At the news of the Russian Revolution of February 1917,
exiled revolutionaries from around the world began to flock back to the
homeland. Trotsky left New York on March 27, 1917, sailing for St.
Petersburg.[4] Bukharin left New York in early April and returned to Russia by way of Japan, arriving in Moscow in early May 1917.[3] Politically, the Bolsheviks in Moscow remained a definite minority to the Mensheviks
and Socialist Revolutionaries. However, as the Russian soldiers and
workers began to realize that only the Bolsheviks would bring peace by
withdrawing from the war and the peasants realized that only the
Bolsheviks would give them their own land, membership in the Bolshevik
faction began to skyrocket—from 24,000 members in February 1917 to
200,000 members in October 1917.[5]
Upon his return to Moscow, Bukharin resumed his seat on the Moscow City
Committee and also became a member of the Moscow Regional Bureau of the
Party.[6]

Initially, the Bolshevik position in Moscow was that of a minority
position to the stronger Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. To
make matters worse, the Bolsheviks themselves were divided into a right
wing and a left wing. The right wing of the Bolsheviks, including Aleksei Rykov and Viktor Nogin, controlled the Moscow Committee, while the younger left-wing Bolsheviks, including Vladimir Smirnov, Valerian Obolensky (other languages), Georgii Lomov, Nikolay Yakovlev (other languages), Ivan Kizelshtein and Ivan Stukov, were members of the Moscow Regional Bureau.[7] On October 10, 1917, Bukharin, along with two other Moscow Bolsheviks—A. S. Bubnov and G. Iu. Sokolnikov—were elected to the Central Committee.[8]
This strong representation on the Central Committee was a direct
recognition of the fact that the Moscow Bureau had grown in importance.
Whereas the Bolsheviks had previously been a minority in Moscow behind
the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, by September 1917 the
Bolsheviks were in the majority in Moscow. Furthermore, the Moscow
Regional Bureau was formally responsible for the party organizations in
each of the thirteen (13) central provinces around Moscow—which
accounted for 37% of the whole population of Russia and 20% of the
Bolshevik membership.[7]

While no one dominated revolutionary politics in Moscow during the
October Revolution, as Trotsky did in St. Petersburg, Bukharin certainly
was the most prominent leader in Moscow.[9] During the October Revolution,
Bukharin drafted, introduced, and defended the revolutionary decrees of
the Moscow Soviet. Bukharin then represented the Moscow Soviet in their
report to the revolutionary government in Petrograd.[10] Following the October Revolution, Bukharin became the editor of the party's newspaper, Pravda.[11]

Bukharin believed passionately in the promise of world revolution. In the Russian turmoil near the end of World War I, when a negotiated peace with the Central Powers was looming, he demanded a continuance of the war, fully expecting to incite all the foreign proletarian classes to arms.[12] Even as he was uncompromising toward Russia's battlefield enemies, he also rejected any fraternization with the capitalist Allied powers: he reportedly wept when he learned of official negotiations for assistance.[12]

Bukharin emerged as the leader of the Left Communists in bitter opposition to Lenin's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.[citation needed]
In this wartime power struggle, he was urged by some of his more fiery
allies to have Lenin arrested. He rejected this idea immediately, but
the issue would later become the basis of Stalinist charges against him,
culminating in the show trial of 1938.[citation needed]

After the ratification of the treaty, Bukharin resumed his
responsibilities within the party. In March 1919, he became a member of
the Comintern's executive committee and a candidate member of the Politburo. During the Civil War period, he published several theoretical economic works, including the popular primer The ABC of Communism (with Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, 1919), and the more academic Economics of the Transitional Period (1920) and Historical Materialism (1921).

By 1921, he changed his position and accepted Lenin's emphasis on the
survival and strengthening of the Soviet state as the bastion of the
future world revolution. He became the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), to which he was to tie his political fortunes. Considered by the
Left Communists as a retreat from socialist policies, the NEP
reintroduced money, allowed private ownership and capitalistic practices
in agriculture, retail trade, and light industry while the state
retained control of heavy industry. While some[who?]
have criticized Bukharin for this apparent U-turn, his change of
emphasis can be partially explained by the necessity for peace and
stability following seven years of war in Russia, and the failure of
communist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, which ended the
prospect of worldwide revolution.

Power struggle

After Lenin's death in 1924, Bukharin became a full member of the Politburo.[13] In the subsequent power struggle among Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev,
and Stalin, Bukharin allied himself with Stalin, who positioned himself
as centrist of the Party and supported the NEP against the Left Opposition, which wanted more rapid industrialization, escalation of class struggle against the kulaks (wealthier peasants), and agitation for world revolution. It was Bukharin who formulated the thesis of "Socialism in One Country" put forth by Stalin in 1924, which argued that socialism
(in Marxist theory, the transitional stage from capitalism to
communism) could be developed in a single country, even one as
underdeveloped as Russia. This new theory stated that revolution need no
longer be encouraged in the capitalist countries since Russia could and
should achieve socialism alone. The thesis would become a hallmark of Stalinism.

Trotsky, the prime force behind the Left Opposition, was defeated by a
triumvirate formed by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, with the support of
Bukharin. At the Fourteenth Party Congress
in December 1925, Stalin openly attacked Kamenev and Zinoviev,
revealing that they had asked for his aid in expelling Trotsky from the
Party. By 1926, the Stalin-Bukharin alliance ousted Zinoviev and Kamenev
from the Party leadership, and Bukharin enjoyed the highest degree of
power during the 1926–1928 period.[14] He emerged as the leader of the Party's right wing, which included two other Politburo members Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and Mikhail Tomsky, head of trade unions, and he became General Secretary of the Comintern's executive committee in 1926.[15]
However, prompted by a grain shortage in 1928, Stalin reversed himself
and proposed a program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization
because he believed that the NEP was not working fast enough. Stalin
felt that in the new situation the policies of his former foes–Trotsky,
Zinoviev, and Kamenev—were the right ones.[16]

Bukharin was worried by the prospect of Stalin's plan, which he
feared would lead to “military-feudal exploitation” of the peasantry.
Bukharin did want the Soviet Union to achieve industrialization but he
preferred the more moderate approach of offering the peasants the
opportunity to become prosperous, which would lead to greater grain
production for sale abroad. Bukharin pressed his views throughout 1928
in meetings of the Politburo and at the Party Congress, insisting that
enforced grain requisition would be counterproductive, as War Communism
had been a decade earlier.[17]

Fall from power

Stalin and Bukharin, c.1928

Bukharin's support of continuation of the NEP was not popular with
higher Party cadres, and his slogan to peasants, "Enrich yourselves!"
and proposal to achieve socialism "at snail's pace" left him vulnerable
to attacks first by Zinoviev and later by Stalin. Stalin attacked
Bukharin's views, portraying them as capitalist deviation and declaring
that the revolution would be at risk without a strong policy that
encouraged rapid industrialization.

Having helped Stalin achieve unchecked power against the Left
Opposition, Bukharin found himself easily outmaneuvered by Stalin. Yet
Bukharin played to Stalin's strength by maintaining the appearance of
unity within the Party leadership. Meanwhile, Stalin used his control of
the Party machine to replace Bukharin's supporters in the Rightist
power base in Moscow, trade unions, and the Comintern.

Bukharin attempted to gain support from earlier foes including
Kamenev and Zinoviev who had fallen from power and held mid-level
positions within the Communist party. The details of his meeting with
Kamenev, to whom he confided that Stalin was "Genghis Khan" and changed
policies to get rid of rivals, were leaked by the Trotskyist press and
subjected him to accusations of factionalism. Eventually, Bukharin lost
his position in the Comintern and the editorship of Pravda in April 1929 and he was expelled from the Politburo on 17 November of that year.[18]

Bukharin was forced to renounce his views under pressure. He wrote
letters to Stalin pleading for forgiveness and rehabilitation, but
through wiretaps of Bukharin's private conversations with Stalin's
enemies, Stalin knew Bukharin's repentance was insincere.[19]

International supporters of Bukharin, Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party USA among them, were also expelled from the Comintern. They formed an international alliance to promote their views, calling it the International Communist Opposition, though it became better known as the Right Opposition, after a term used by the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the Soviet Union to refer to Bukharin and his supporters there.

Great purge

Stalin's
collectivization policy proved to be as disastrous as Bukharin
predicted, but Stalin had by then achieved unchallenged authority in the
party leadership. However, there were signs that moderates among
Stalin's supporters sought to end official terror and bring a general
change in policy, now that mass collectivization was largely completed
and the worst was over. Although Bukharin had not challenged Stalin
since 1929, his former supporters, including Martemyan Ryutin, drafted and clandestinely circulated an anti-Stalin platform, which called Stalin the "evil genius of the Russian Revolution".

In the brief period of thaw in 1934–1936, Bukharin was politically rehabilitated and was made editor of Izvestia in 1934. There, he consistently highlighted the dangers of fascist regimes in Europe and the need for "proletarian humanism".

However, Sergey Kirov,
First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee was assassinated in
Leningrad in December 1934, and his death was used by Stalin as a
pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people were to perish as Stalin eliminated all past and potential opposition to his authority.[20]
Some historians now believe that Kirov's assassination in 1934 was
arranged by Stalin himself or at least that there is sufficient evidence
to plausibly posit such a conclusion.[21] After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD
charged an ever-growing group of former oppositionists with Kirov's
murder and other acts of treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.[22]

Tightening noose

In
February 1936, shortly before the purge started in earnest, Bukharin
was sent to Paris by Stalin to negotiate the purchase of the Marx and
Engels archives, held by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) before its dissolution by Hitler. He was joined by his young wife Anna Larina,
which therefore opened the possibility of exile, but he decided against
it, saying that he could not live outside the Soviet Union.

Bukharin, who had been forced to follow the Party line since 1929,
confided to his old friends and former opponents his real view of Stalin
and his policy. His conversations with Boris Nicolaevsky, a Menshevik
leader who held the manuscripts on behalf of the SPD, formed the basis
of "Letter of an Old Bolshevik", which was very influential in
contemporary understanding of the period (especially the Ryutin Affair and the Kirov murder) although there are doubts about its authenticity.

According to Nicolaevsky, Bukharin spoke of "the mass annihilation of
completely defenseless men, with women and children" under forced
collectivization and liquidation of kulaks
as a class that dehumanized the Party members with "the profound
psychological change in those communists who took part in the campaign.
Instead of going mad, they accepted terror as a normal administrative
method and regarded obedience to all orders from above as a supreme
virtue. ... They are no longer human beings. They have truly become the
cogs in a terrible machine."[23]

Yet to another Menshevik leader, Fyodor Dan,
he confided that Stalin became "the man to whom the Party granted its
confidence" and "is a sort of a symbol of the Party" even though he "is
not a man, but a devil."[24]
In Dan's account, Bukharin's acceptance of the Soviet Union's new
direction was thus a result of his utter commitment to Party solidarity.

To André Malraux, he also confided, "Now he is going to kill me". To his boyhood friend, Ilya Ehrenburg,
he expressed the suspicion that the whole trip was a trap set up by
Stalin. Indeed, his contacts with Mensheviks during this trip were to
feature prominently in his trial.

Trial

Following
the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other leftist Old
Bolsheviks in 1936, Bukharin and Rykov were arrested on 27 February 1937
following a plenum of the Central Committee and were charged with
conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state.

Bukharin was tried in the Trial of the Twenty One on 2–13 March 1938 during the Great Purges, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky, Genrikh Yagoda,
and 16 other defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of
Rightists and Trotskyites". Meant to be the culmination of previous show trials, it was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the Soviet Union and hand out her territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain.

Even more than earlier Moscow show trials, Bukharin's trial horrified
many previously sympathetic observers as they watched allegations
become more absurd than ever and the purge expand to include almost
every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. For some prominent
communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler,
the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism and even
turned the first three into fervent anti-Communists eventually.[25]

While Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov
later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured and his letters from
prison do not give the suggestion that he was tortured, it is also known
that his interrogators were instructed with the order: "beating
permitted". Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young
wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore
him down.[26]
But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by
Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all
over again, with a double team of interrogators.[27][28]

Bukharin's confession and his motivation became subject of much
debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror.
His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he
pleaded guilty to the "sum total of crimes," he denied knowledge when it
came to specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would
allow only what was in the written confession and refuse to go any
further.

There are several interpretations of Bukharin's motivations (beside
being coerced) in the trial. Koestler and others viewed it as a true
believer's last service to the Party (while preserving the little amount
of personal honor left) whereas Bukharin biographer Stephen Cohen and
Robert Tucker saw traces of Aesopian language,
with which Bukharin sought to turn the table into an anti-trial of
Stalinism (while keeping his part of the bargain to save his family).
While his letters to Stalin – he wrote 34 very emotional and desperate
letters tearfully protesting his innocence and professing his loyalty –
suggest a complete capitulation and acceptance of his role in the trial,
it contrasts with his actual conduct in the trial. Bukharin himself
speaks of his "peculiar duality of mind" in his last plea, which led to
"semi-paralysis of the will" and Hegelian "unhappy consciousness",
which likely stemmed not only from his knowledge of the ruinous reality
of Stalinism (although he could not of course say so in the trial) but
also of the impending threat of fascism.[29]

The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a
"degenerate fascist" working for the "restoration of capitalism") and
subtle criticisms of the trial. After disproving several charges against
him (one observer noted that he "proceeded to demolish or rather showed
he could very easily demolish the whole case."[30])
and saying that "the confession of the accused is not essential. The
confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a
trial that was solely based on confessions, he finished his last plea
with the words:

While in prison, he wrote at least four book-length manuscripts including a lyrical autobiographical novel, How It All Began, philosophical treatise Philosophical Arabesques, a collection of poems, and Socialism and Its Culture – all of which were found in Stalin's archive and published in the 1990s.

Execution

Among other intercessors, the French author and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland
wrote to Stalin seeking clemency, arguing that "an intellect like that
of Bukharin is a treasure for his country." He compared Bukharin's
situation to that of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier who was guillotined during the French Revolution:
"We in France, the most ardent revolutionaries... still profoundly
grieve and regret what we did. ... I beg you to show clemency." [32]
He had earlier written to Stalin in 1937, "For the sake of Gorky I am
asking you for mercy, even if he may be guilty of something," to which
Stalin noted: "We must not respond." Bukharin was shot on 15 March 1938,
but the announcement of his death was overshadowed by the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.[33]

Bukharin's last message to Stalin: 'Koba, why do you need me to die?'
was written in a note to Stalin just before his execution. ("Koba" was
Stalin's revolutionary pseudonym, and Bukharin's use of it was a sign of
how close the two had once been. The note was found still in Stalin's
desk after his death in 1953).[34]

Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband officially rehabilitated by the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.

Political stature and achievements

Nikolai Bukharin

Bukharin was immensely popular within the party throughout the
twenties and thirties, even after his fall from power. In his testament,
Lenin portrayed him as the Golden Boy of the party,[35] writing:

Bukharin made several notable contributions to Marxist–Leninist thought, most notably The Economics of the Transition Period (1920) and his prison writings, Philosophical Arabesques,[36]
(which clearly reveal Bukharin had corrected the 'one-sidedness' of his
thought), as well as being a founding member of the Soviet Academy of
Arts and Sciences, and a keen botanist.
His primary contributions to economics were his critique of marginal
utility theory, his analysis of imperialism, and his writings on the
transition to communism in the Soviet Union.[37]

His ideas, especially in economics and the question of
market-socialism, later became highly influential in Chinese
market-socialism and Deng Xiao Ping's reforms.

British author Martin Amis
argues that Bukharin was perhaps the only major Bolshevik to
acknowledge "moral hesitation" by questioning, even in passing, the
violence and sweeping reforms of the early Soviet Union. Amis writes
that Bukharin said "during the Civil War he had seen 'things that I
would not want even my enemies to see'."[38]

Works

Books and articles

1915: Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State

1917: Imperialism and World Economy

1917: The Russian Revolution and Its Significance

1918: Anarchy and Scientific Communism

1918: Programme of the World Revolution

1919: Church and School in the Soviet Republic

1919: The Red Army and the Counter Revolution

1919: Soviets or Parliament

1920: The ABC of Communism with Evgenii Preobrazhensky

1920: On Parliamentarism

1920: The Secret of the League (part I)

1920: The Secret of the League (part II)

1920: The Organisation of the Army and the Structure of Society

1920: Common Work for the Common Pot

1921: The Era of Great Works

1921: The New Economic Policy Of Soviet Russia

1921: Historical Materialism—a system of Sociology

1922: Economic Organization in Soviet Russia

1923: A Great Marxian Party

1923: The Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party

1924: Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital

1924: The Theory of Permanent Revolution

1926: Building Up Socialism

1926: The Tasks of the Russian Communist Party

1927: Economic Theory of the Leisure Class

1927: The World Revolution and the U.S.S.R.

1928: New Forms of the World Crisis

1929: Notes of an Economist

1930: Finance Capital in Papal Robes. A Challenge!

1931: Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism

1933: Marx's Teaching and its Historical Importance

1934: Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.

Cartoons

Nikolai Bukharin was a cartoonist who left many cartoons of contemporary Soviet politicians. The renowned artist Konstantin Yuon once told him: "Forget about politics. There is no future in politics for you. Painting is your real calling."[39]
His cartoons are sometimes used to illustrate biographies of Soviet
officials. Russian historian Yury Zhukov stated that Nikolai Bukarin's
portraits of Joseph Stalin were the only ones drawn from the original, not from a photograph.[40]